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The use of the term 'climate denier' in rational debate is up there with 'my dad's bigger than yours' or 'you're wrong because you smell'. Taking it literally it's patently wrong since there is probably no one who denies that there is a climate. 'Climate denier' makes as much sense as 'table denier' and so it should be easy to laugh off but for the nastier connotation.

That leads me on to the next thing that's wrong with it, the blatant appeal to emotion that is the linguistic link to Holocaust denial (in any case my Jewish neighbours tell me a better term is Shoah). I haven't asked them how they feel about the Shoah, the deliberate and systematic state sponsored persecutions, enslavement and eventually murder of six million or so Jews over just a dozen years or so, being trivialised by comparison with something that is neither premeditated nor likely to kill anything like as many so quickly even if the alarmists are right. Of course if we stick with the term Holocaust so as to include the eastern Europeans, gypsies, gays, disabled and anyone else the fluff lipped fucknuts running the show wasn't keen on we can add possibly as much as another six million, which makes the warble gloaming alarmists' use of the emotionally loaded term 'denier' to try to shut the argument down even more distasteful.

None of that goes away when the alarmists say that it's just short for 'climate change denier' - the trivialisation of the state sponsored murder of approximately a million people per year is still there, on top of which there is no serious denial of climate change among sceptics either. Most of us point out that as far as anyone knows the climate has been always been changing for the entire 4.5 billion history of the planet (which is one of the main points: what's happening now isn't new). Even the term climate change is stupid without the revolting 'denier' tag - a noun followed by the verb for what it does all the time. It makes as much sense as calling a trout a 'fish swim'.

The irony is that the ill informed may now believe that until the Industrial Revolution the climate was always stable and unchanging when nothing could be further from the truth. Much as I hate to use the term myself but making such a claim is truly denying the realities of climate change. Questioning the unproven and arguably rather shaky theory that it's all driven by CO₂ and a net positive feedback for which there's little or no evidence isn't denying a fucking thing - it's asking for more than the assurances of people with a vested interest in promoting public belief in what they espouse, and who keep fucking up their so-called settled science.

If Gordon can't tell the difference he's not bright enough to be Prime Minister. But that wouldn't be anything new either.


H/T Counting Cats in Zanzibar.


UPDATE: Of course 72,231 signed this petition and were not merely turned down but ignored. Colostomy Brown's (edited to add: much genuflection in the direction of Dungeekin for that) response was simply two sentences of cockwaffle that didn't even address the petition. Expect more of the same.